{"id":7847,"date":"2015-11-04T00:01:31","date_gmt":"2015-11-04T08:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=7847"},"modified":"2016-10-15T13:38:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-15T20:38:00","slug":"porchcam-3-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=7847","title":{"rendered":"PorchCam 3.0"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was so excited. I thought I had a new PorchCam for Wambooli. A better camera than the old Foscams I purchased. Something designed for outdoor use, with pan\/tilt\/zoom and IR for night time images. Oh boy!
\n
\nThe price was good: About $140, which isn’t cheap but it’s less than the $600 models you probably see outdoors in our surveillance-riddled society.<\/p>\n

Who makes it? I dunno. It wasn’t a Foscam camera, and that’s pretty much all that mattered to me.<\/p>\n

The Foscam cameras were designed for indoor use, so they barely survived the winter. The webcam is its own web server. You access the controls by using a web browser. Log into the web page and you can control the camera, see what it sees, and listen.<\/p>\n

The problem with the Foscam devices is that they rely upon a 20-year-old Microsoft technology called ActiveX<\/a>. It was Microsoft’s attempt to automate the web and, like many of their attempts, it sucked.<\/p>\n

ActiveX blew so much spew that even Microsoft confessed to how wretched it was, so they halted development a while back. That apparently doesn’t stop the Asian webcam developers from continuing to use the horrid technology.<\/p>\n

The last Foscam software update I pulled failed. Even using ActiveX on an older version of Internet Explorer, I couldn’t access the camera’s controls. The same crap happened with the “new” camera: I installed it and — lo and behold — I needed to install ActiveX to get it to work.<\/p>\n

My disappointing was volcanic.<\/p>\n

So I boxed it up and contacted the vendor for a refund and return.<\/p>\n

Here is the review I wrote on Amazon:<\/p>\n

I was really hoping for a decent webcam, but this device proved just as disappointing as the Focscam cameras I’d given up on long ago.<\/p>\n

I can forgive the rotten English instructions and useless manual. I could also forgive the fact that this specific model isn’t listed in the manual. The gizmo has a cable with three wires: One is power, one is Ethernet, and the other is a mystery. Is it a button? I don’t know because it’s not in the wretched manual. And where is the Wi-Fi antenna shown in the picture? I received no such thing in the box.<\/p>\n

To use the camera, you must access its web server. To do that, you must kowtow to the manufacturer’s insistence upon using Active X to access the browser administration page. It. Just. Doesn’t. Work. And why should it? Active X is a horrid, outdated technology, one I specifically disable on my systems.<\/p>\n

Chrome doesn’t do Active X. I tried accessing the server via Microsoft Edge. That works, but the live stream doesn’t show up. At all. It keeps insisting that I install Active X, which is the same nonsense I went through with the Foscam webcams. So what’s the point of even buying this gizmo when I can’t access its live video stream?<\/p>\n

I must mention that the mobile stream worked, so the camera isn’t a dud. Still, I returned it because I demand something that actually functions, has a useful manual, and doesn’t drive me nuts with Active X.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sadly, the vendor is playing hardball and won’t accept the return. I have updated my review to include that relevant information.<\/p>\n

And so the search for PorchCam 3.0 continues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not happening yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[23],"class_list":["post-7847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-porchcam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7847"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7855,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7847\/revisions\/7855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}